Following an extended period of consulting to AIFS, working closely with the internal team and gaining a deep understanding of their requirements, PreviousNext were engaged for the design, development and migration of the main AIFS website and numerous sub-sites, onto the Drupal platform.
The Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS) is the Australian Government’s key research body in the area of family well-being with a history of more than 30 years of analysing factors that affect how Australian families function. Their research provides an evidence base for developing policy and practice related to the welfare of families across Australia.
Challenge
With the desire to market themselves in a more interactive way through their website, AIFS made the decision to move across to the Drupal CMS for increased content management functionality and for the option of more flexible, accessible and responsive ways of displaying content. As their existing site contained a substantial amount of high value content in the form of research publications, the breadth of requirements was extensive and would call for a significant overhaul to the information architecture. This would result in improved content discoverability across all subsites and subsequently make it easier for users to discover the depth of the material available to them.
Solution
In developing the solution, PreviousNext built a distribution for AIFS - a pre-configured version of Drupal that is able to be used across their network of sites, is easily reconfigured to allow for customisations and boasts rich search capability across all sub-sites. We helped the AIFS team in becoming self-sufficient in terms of managing their sites, working closely alongside their internal team to assist them in becoming much more educated about Drupal, becoming efficient in the use of the distribution, and also with the ongoing management, maintenance and hosting of their numerous sites. They now have have a collection of integrated, content-managed websites that are the central hub for sharing and transferring knowledge generated by the Institute.
Outcome
Hosted internally, the new AIFS website was successfully launched in mid 2015, the new distribution now implemented across their network of sites including the Australian Gambling Research Centre, Child Family Community Australia and numerous other sites that cater to separate projects of the Institute.
aifs.gov.au